The second game in the SimCity series. In addition to improving on everything that was in the original, it adds an incredible number of new features and swaps the top-down perspective of the original for an isometric view.
Debug Menu#
Type oivaizmir in the Windows 3.1 version or priscilla in the Windows 95 version to add a Debug option to the menu bar. This menu contains twelve options, but one of them doesn't seem to function as intended. While the menu gives some cheat options, its most interesting feature is that it allows some disasters that are normally only available randomly or in scenarios to be triggered at will.
Option |
Function |
|---|---|
Show Version Info... |
Opens a dialog showing the official release version, internal version, and compile time and date for the game. |
More Money |
Adds $500,000 to the city's treasury. This will not be reflected until the next game month or you make changes that cost money (such as creating new zones). |
Add All Gifts |
Adds all of the buildings unlocked by population to the rewards button. This also unlocks all of the buildings and transit options that have yet to be invented. |
Add All Inventions |
Opens the help file. The gift option above already does what this option claims to. |
Melt Down |
Triggers the nuclear meltdown disaster. Only works if the city has a nuclear power plant. When triggered from the menu, the disaster will occur on the most recently constructed nuclear power plant. |
Microwave |
Triggers the "oops" microwave beam disaster. Only works if the city has a microwave power plant. When triggered from the menu, the disaster will occur in the vicinity of the most recently constructed microwave power plant. |
Volcano |
Triggers the volcano disaster used in the Portland scenario. The terrain in a location raises somewhat randomly, forming a mountain, while fires and gas clouds are spawned in the vicinity. |
Fire Storm |
Triggers the firestorm disaster used in the Oakland scenario. Places an 8x8 in the city, near the "center of development". If used repeatedly before the fires spread, will enlarge the area of the fire square by 1 tile on all sides (e.g. 3 uses of the command will result in a 10x10 sized square of fire). |
Mass Riots |
Triggers the lawyer riot disaster used in the Washington DC scenario. Spawns several groups of rioters in the city at once, as opposed to the normal riot disaster option which only spawns one. |
Major Flood |
Triggers the flood used in the Davenport scenario. It's a larger flood than normal, unsurprisingly, but still small compared to the hurricane disaster. |
Toxic Spill |
Triggers the chemical spill disaster used in the Chicago scenario. Spawns several gas clouds which float around the city and cause buildings to be abandoned. |
Graph Kludge |
Can reset graph drawing parameters if thrown out of whack during game. Useful if a given graph line's changes are hard to see due to the autoscaling. |
Inaccessible Code#
The Windows 95 version of the game contains an entry in the cheat code table newhouse that is supposed to trigger a firestorm disaster. However, due to how the code recognition is implemented and the presence of another code that starts with "n" in the table (noah), this code can never be triggered. This is likely a nod to designer Will Wright's house burning down during the Oakland firestorm of 1991, which is present as a scenario in the game.
Cut/Missing Features#
Autosave#
The Windows 95 version of SimCity 2000 was intended to have an autosave feature at one point, but this was scrapped before release. Remnants of the autosave code exist, albeit not hooked up to the simulation event loop, as well as a menu tooltip in the game EXE's resources (string table resource ID 32921 reads "Saves City Every 5 Years"). No corresponding menu item exists in the menu resources, nor is there a function in the game's code to handle enabling/disabling an autosave option.
Maxis Presents Screen#
In the Macintosh and DOS versions of the game, a screen with a "Maxis Presents" logo is shown before the game's title screen. In the Windows 95 release, this is conspicuously missing due to a change in the menu event loop causing the transition from the initial startup to skip over the Maxis Presents screen, the code for which is still present. The code for the Maxis Presents screen attempts to load the logo bitmap with a misspelled filename, which causes the game to crash; it is possible that the menu event loop was modified to skip over this as the misspelling was not noticed at the time, as the Windows 95 port was developed in "crunch mode" with a development beta of Windows 95 and Visual C++ 2.1, and the initial release was compiled ten days before the general availability release of Windows 95.
Extra Music#
There are 19 pieces of music (composed by Sue Kasper and arranged by Brian Conrad and Michael Perry) included in the game, though due to multiple programming oversights in the music engine, five of them (tracks 3, 7, 11, 13 and 17) are never played.